My first full flight in P3Dv4.1 VR

[Gridley]

I have an opportunity to borrow an Oculus Rift for a few weeks.  Like many of you, I've been reluctant to purchase as I'm not sure whether I'd like the experience or not, and I'm not really looking to use it for anything other than flight sims, predominantly P3Dv4.1 at this point.  I thought I'd share my experience with the rest of you fence-sitters. I'm running P3Dv4.1 with a ton of addons (VoxATC for ATC [and AI using MyTraffic6.0a models], OrbX global, terrain, vector, NALC, regions, airports, ActiveSky for P3D, ASCA and PTA).  My hardware is an I7-7700k @4.8ghz, 32gb RAM, GTX 1080.  I ran a bunch of aborted flights to tweak in VR, but for this first complete flight, I flew VFR from KHAF (Half Moon Bay, OrbX) to KHJO (Hanford Muni).  It's a nice flight over the south bay, over a mountainous region and into farm land.  Nice diversity of landscapes to experience.  I flew in the A2A C182.

Also, I ended up getting FlyInside for P3D as it really improves the smoothness and the floating virtual windows are essential to keep the headset on in flight.

• Negatives with my hardware:
  • Weird sensation that the grass at airports is sunken a few feet below the taxiways and tarmac, and objects like taxiway signs and runway edge light are floating.  I've seen this at both default stock airports and addons.  I posted over at the LM forums, no official response yet.  Another AVSIM user suggested it was due to tessellation, but I tried that on and off via slider and p3d.cfg but no difference.
  • I had to turn off terrain shadows due to extensive flickering of tiny little spots that were different in each eye.  Plus is this helps performance quite a bit.
  • Overall resolution leaves something to be desired. It's not "screen door effect" but rather just low pixel density and jagged edges that are not optimal.
  • Clicking and operating some of the knobs and other cockpit controls is not easy with the rift touch controllers, but the mouse does float in 3D 
• Positives:
  • AMAZING feeling of being IN the cockpit.  You feel the size of the cockpit.  I also have be flying in IL2:BoS and those cockpits are even better and claustrophobic but amazing sensation of realism.
  • "Screen door effect (SDE)" was not as bad as I expected based on other reviews. You can see more jagged edges and low-res textures as a result of the pixel density, but it was easy for me to ignore and get used to it.  
  • Similarly, gauge legibility was not as bad as I expected.  The GPS was a little tiny, and I couldn't lean far enough in without hitting my real head on the printer () so I ended up using a popup virtual window to help with that.  Also, I still use the VoxATC window to read off of when speaking to ATC, so I had to have that window as a flyinside virtual window on my lap.  I could easily read all the main six pack gauges without any special effort.  The smaller gauges like manifold pressure and cylinder head temp I had to lean over and in to, but not unrealistically so.
  • Airports and AI traffic really come to life and seeing them taxi around the airport breathes a dimensionality and size to the airport that you can't get in 2D.

The flight was pretty amazing.  Departing out over the Pacific, seeing the homes and other structures on the hillside and the terrain falling away toward the beach and ocean was tremendous.  Then flying through some cumulus as we approach the mountains - superb immersion.  The clouds have much better height and mass than in 2D. The mountains looks absolutely suberb and the VFR approach to KHJO was actually much easier with the depth perception.  I use a hotas setup and VoxATC for voice controlled ATC, so I was able to keep the headset on the entire flight.  Setting the transponder with the oculus touch was impossible, as well as tuning the radios - I have to fiddle blindly for the mouse to do that.  Other than that, complete immersion.

Frame rate was smooth, though actual FPS was probably around 30-40, FlyInside made it very smooth and I have no issues with that performance.  I left all my other settings as they are in my 2D setup which are here:

 

 

So, am I going to buy a Rift or Vive once I have to give this one back?  No.  This experience has certainly solidified for me that I will NEED to buy a VR setup sometime. It was just too great an experience and performance exceeded my expectations.  I could easily see myself buying in when the Vive Pro is released, or whatever Oculus releases in competition, or if the Window Mixed Reality headsets are made to work with FlyInside.  The higher resolution options are just too close to release for me to commit to the current generation of HMDs.

Also, check out this thread for more info (it's from last summer, but still accurate).

[whitav8]

One thing that you didn't mention in your testing is about image clarity and the use of the free application by a fellow named ApollyonVR called Oculus Tray Tool (OTT) This allows you to dramatically improve clarity by using SuperSampling (render larger than final then downsample). Most of us require it and many Oculus games already have it included but not P3Dv4.1 so OTT allows you to set that up - a good starting value is 1.5 and max is 2.0 but really slows down framerates.

This is discussed on the Oculus Forum - https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/47247/oculus-traytool-supersampling-profiles-hmd-disconnect-fixes-hopefully

 

The other thing you should try is Native VR without FlyInside - you will miss the virtual windows (for now - but the latest Oculus Home 1.22 has them - it is very experimental ). Native VR has a bit better image clarity on it own when compared to FlyInside. To test the Native VR, just start Prepar3D.exe without using the FlyInside Icon and then use the VR tab and Enable Virtual Reality in P3D.

 

 

 

 

[Gridley]

32 minutes ago, whitav8 said:

One thing that you didn't mention in your testing is about image clarity and the use of the free application by a fellow named ApollyonVR called Oculus Tray Tool (OTT) This allows you to dramatically improve clarity by using SuperSampling (render larger than final then downsample). Most of us require it and many Oculus games already have it included but not P3Dv4.1 so OTT allows you to set that up - a good starting value is 1.5 and max is 2.0 but really slows down framerates.

This is discussed on the Oculus Forum - https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/47247/oculus-traytool-supersampling-profiles-hmd-disconnect-fixes-hopefully

 

The other thing you should try is Native VR without FlyInside - you will miss the virtual windows (for now - but the latest Oculus Home 1.22 has them - it is very experimental ). Native VR has a bit better image clarity on it own when compared to FlyInside. To test the Native VR, just start Prepar3D.exe without using the FlyInside Icon and then use the VR tab and Enable Virtual Reality in P3D.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for the note, Whitav8, I'll try these suggestions out. I was thinking that Oculus has it's own ASW feature, which should be similar to what FlyInside does, but using FlyInside still seemed smoother.  Do you recommend avoiding the Oculus home 1.22 for now or should I give it a shot?  I assume that's a beta version?  I'll google...

[whitav8]

Don't try the Oculus Home Dash in 1.22 - just use the Classic. Read the Oculus Forum https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/categories/general about 1.22 and see if Dash is safe - I don't think it is!

 

Also, if you have the time, please try Combat Air Patrol 2 and/or Aerofly FS2 from Steam  (you can return them for full refund if you don't run them more than 2 hours and less than a 2 week install - then remove them). They really perform so much better than P3Dv4.1 but don't have many features like ATC/AI/FMS/Weather/Multiplayer...- they really make VFR VR look great. Remember to always set SuperSampling/Render Scale Factor/ Pixel Density to 1.5

 

Dave

[Gridley]

On 1/28/2018 at 6:18 PM, whitav8 said:

Also, if you have the time, please try Combat Air Patrol 2...

Dave

I've been shying away from this one because a lot of the reviews trash it.  Have you had any issues with controls and assigning controls to joystick?  I like the idea of a "light" sim every now and then.